Pre-Sapiens man was a treat. For predators, that is. A silly monkey that would have been far better off staying in the trees. A soft, tasty, slow and defenceless creature. Safety came in numbers, and in having a brain.
Now, human sexuality has developed around the hidden fertility of the female, which developed along with the behaviour we call love, as it was beneficial to survival to have a mate who hung around for a while, especially as as our species evolved, the helpless infant phase became greatly prelonged.
Likewise, I believe our ability to believe in intangibles is a survival feature. A community featuring high numbers of those who could co-operate together for the greater good of the community would survive better than one of rugged individualists, and those that could believe in intangibles were more able to co-operate, thus more likely to survive, and thus the characteristic would survive.
The ability to hold intangible beliefs in common meant that social structures were more stable, with a minimum of internal violence... you don't really need to worry about whether Og'abah is going to bury a stone axe in your head and take your woman if there are more pressing peroblems, such as Hyenas the size of monster trucks, and mummy sabretooth 'tigers' who bring their cubs to practice on the monkeys before letting them try their fangs on things with hard hooves, horns or tusks.
It is no more a sign of god's existence than is the behaviour of a horse if it sees something moving above and behind it. The human ability to believe, and the mad "Oh shit, it's a Jaguar!" reaction of a horse are just survival features.
Now, it's a great survival feature to use in an arguement to support the existence of god. But just as taking a water-proof jacket off on horse-back on a windy day can make the horse THINK that there's a Jaguar about to leap on it, so can our survival feature makes people THINK there is a god, due to the reactions it engenders.
On these grounds alone I don't see the 'god-spot' as being in any way a proof or support of the existence of god. If you add the fact that religious belief has been proven in twin studies to be probably as genetically linked as homosexuality, then it makes it obvious that we're just dealing with an evolutionary behavioural artifact, like the way babies grasp fingers really tightly, or make a wild grabbing motions if you let them drop backwards.
To argue otherwise is to accept that some people are genetically 'damned' - it's impossible, if homosexuality is genetically linked, to accept god would condemn people for being the way that they are 'meant' to be - the Biblical prohibitions are just cultural bigotry, not divine word. Likewise, it's impossible to accept god would 'damn' people because they just don't have good genes for believing in god.
Thus I find the contention ;
The bottom line is that regardless of the possibilities, we no longer believe because of our Watchtower experience
. Like it our not the WT has changed us and continues to affect us.
(emphasis mine)
... utterly unproved, and with many 'ah, you don't believe in god because you were a Witness and are bitter/have your trust destroyed' arguements, a little offensive. It spits in the face of every hour of study or research done by people who may well have been Witnesses, but who now choose not to believe in god as they find no proof of god. It's like saying that those xJW's who do believe in god are too brainwashed, scared, lazy or just plain stupid to do enough study to find out the facts.
I would love to believe in god, an afterlife, a plan, some coherence. But there is no proof, and logic alone dictates that there would be proof - as in as provable and quantifiable as gravity. On this basis, I don't believe in god.
Of course, this is part I of my response, and I look forward with interest to part II, as I understand I may have gone ahead slightly.
